Online dating has grown to be a widely used resource for today’s singles. In 2003, 2 out of 5 singles were using an online dating service (Ellison, Heino, & Gibbs, 2006). One issue with online dating is the truthfulness of participants’ self-presentations. In 2001, one study showed that over 25% of users misrepresented some aspect of their identity (ibid). Considering the prevalence of both participation and misrepresentation in online dating sites, we believe there is much to be gained from exploring further the influences of misrepresentations in online dating profiles.
Past research has shown people tend to lie less in communication modes that encompass some form of archived record. The presence of some form of archived information is correlated with lower lying rates (Hancock, Thom-Santelli, and Ritchie, 2004). Expanding upon this idea, we propose an experiment that would explore how the availability of records, in this case a dating profile, might be influential on one's inclination to misrepresent oneself. We hypothesize that users would misrepresent themselves less if they believed others would be viewing their profile (archived information) frequently throughout their interactions.
For this experiment, we would create an online dating service with two different layouts to alter a medium variable. In the first condition, the limited access condition, people could browse others’ profiles freely at first. Then, in order to show interest in someone, they would click something which would bring them to a screen where they could create a message to send to the person of interest. From that point on, clicking on the person and/or profile of interest would bring the user directly to the message string and they would no longer be able to access the other's profile (some users may even suspect this to be an oversight in the functionality of the dating website). In the second condition, the imposed information condition, users again would be able to browse potential mates’ profiles freely and again would click something to show their interest which would begin a string of messages between the two users of the dating site. In this condition, whenever the user wrote messages in the message string, they would be forced to face the profile information as the profile would be above the text box in the message writing screen (much like the way facebook wall text boxes are nested among information about a person).
In order to operationalize the level of a participants' misrepresentation in his/her profile, we would survey those who met face to face with the participant as it would be very difficult to create an objective, generalizable coding scheme for gauging the accuracy of a users' profile. It also measures misrepresentation according to Clark's notion of "what the speaker is to be taken to mean," what is ultimately important in dating profiles. We would ask the survey-taker about how much the other misrepresented subjective qualities about him/herself such as his/her appreciation of humor or love of the outdoors, giving them a copy of their partner's profile to look at while they completed the survey. One factor we must control is how much increased exposure to another’s profile influenced perception. For example, if someone was continually reminded that her partner considered himself ambitious, she may consider him more or less ambitious than if she had only seen this information once. To control for this, we would look at all combinations of pairs, limited access users who dated other limited access users, limited access users who dated imposed information users, and imposed information users who dated other imposed information users. The participants would not know that others had a different layout than their own, so they would not factor this in to their profile creation. If there were enough data that only a subset was needed for significant results, we would use the CDMA data sampling technique of sampling by individual and surveying all those who interacted with individuals within the subset. We hypothesize that limited access users would be rated as misrepresenting themselves far more than the imposed information users.
*Note: We recognize it would be extremely difficult to actually create an online dating service for the purpose of an experiment, but you said our experiment didn’t have to be entirely feasible. A more realistic experiment might involve studying the level of misrepresentation between several preexisting dating sites which allow different levels of accessibility to user profiles.
Sources
Ellison, N., Heino, R., & Gibbs, J. (2006). Managing impressions online: Self-presentation processes in the online dating environment. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 2. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/ellison.html
Hancock, J., Thom-Santelli, J., & Ritchie, T. (2004). Deception and design: The impact of communication technology on lying behavior. In E. Dykstra-Erickson & M. Tscheligi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 129-134). New York: ACM.
Hello Uncommon Ground.
ReplyDeleteGreat first post as a team. I really like this thought experiment: it takes an important individual factor (recordability) and manipulates in a domain known to involve decepion (online dating). I also really like how you brought in Clark's notion of meaning ("what the speaker is taken to mean") to define deception in your study. The CDMA part is less clear, but given the operationalization you've done, I suspect it would be feasible. And you're right, the study didn't need to be totally plausible, so this is fine.
You should work a little on your space - get profiles of the members in here, describe the group a bit, etc.
Very very nice first start as a group.